Human society is reproduced through the activities of its members. Unlike non-human species humans do not reproduce only in numbers but they reproduce what we call as social statuses and social personhoods. Social statuses are governed by norms and principles a large component of which determine the roles that people play as men and women in society. Although complex societies have numerous roles to be played and everyone play multiple roles that fit various dimensions of their lives like family, workplace, leisure etc. the minimum division of roles between men and women determine the edifice on which society is built and this role plying is informed not merely by utilitarian criterion of efficiency and ability but by primordial considerations of nature, cosmology and religion. Women’s roles are not understandable without referring to the structure of the entire society and the basic norms and values that govern the society. Finnegan’s paper in this volume describes the assumption of a physician’s role by a women in ancient Greece and the furor it created. Often as in eighteenth century England, women wrote under pseudonyms, to get accepted as authors as they believed that they would be socially ostracized if it became known that they had taken on a male role, that of a writer.
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